Thanks for the support on part 1 of this post. There were some comments, many re-tweets and likes for the original post, but perhaps the best part was when Sachinist.com reached out to me for my permission to republish the blog on their website! Part 1 is now re-published on their website and by now, has 300+ likes!

As promised, in the concluding part of the post, I will focus on comparing Sachin with Sachin, i.e. I will compare Sachin’s current form (which Sachin haters are questioning) with his overall career (which even the harshest Sachin-critics can not challenge).

A method to analyze a batsman’s form through the years is to track a running average for 10 innings, i.e. instead of drawing a graph for scores in each innings, an average is calculated for every 10 innings (i.e. 1-10, then 2-11, 3-12 and so on) and a graph is drawn for these running averages. This allows us to take into account fluctuations in a batsman’s form over a period of time and get rid of temporary peaks and troughs that a single double century or a duck may create.

In the graphs below, I have plotted both the career average as well as running average at each point in Sachin’s career. So at any point the running average graph is higher than the career average, you can assume that Sachin is in a very good form (Anything higher than his terrific career average has to be terrific!) and if the running average is below the career graph, perhaps he is relatively (remember, relatively!)  out of form.

Check out the above graph and decide if Sachin is really at the lowest point in his career; so low that his critics and many former Cricketers want him to be dropped from the team. Far from it, in fact in ODIs, his current performance is comparable to his overall career (until recently it was higher than his career form).

In tests, though the current performance is lower than the career average graph, it is far from being Sachin’s lowest point in his career. I guess most Sachin fans remember that dreadful word “Endulkar” that was used to describe him being out of form and indicated that he was nearing his career end. As you can see from the graph, that dip in form was quite deep and lasted for a long, long time. But he fought back and showed that he still had a lot of Cricket left in him! I am sure he will bounce back again very soon! (And before you get too hung up on the fact that his test form is below his career form, remember that it is still around 40, which is considered quite decent for most other batsmen!)

Finally, here is another set of snapshots to show that Sachin’s current form is consistent with his complete batting career. The following pie charts compare a breakdown of  Sachin’s scores by score-ranges.

In ODI, If you see carefully, the share of non-performance (0-24 runs) and average performances (25-49 runs) has more or less stayed the same. (Combined 68% for the whole career, and 69% for last two years) What has definitely risen is the  share of great performances (100+ scores) and extra-ordinary performance (150+scores). Sachin haters, Is that what you call as being terribly out of form?

In test matches, the picture is even clearer. The share of non-performance (<25 runs) has dipped from 44% to 36%. And together below 50 scores, account for just 59% of recent innings as compared to 62% for overall career. The share of centuries has declined a bit (16% versus 17%), but that can hardly be considered an evidence of being in a bad form. This is still a century in every sixth innings!

To conclude, I would again say that I am certainly disappointed with some of his recent showings, but I am sure that he will do what he has always done; he will answer his critics with his bat! He already has almost all batting records in both Tests and ODIs in his kitty, and the hundredth 100 is just another milestone that will come by soon. But as my friend Alok says (and I can not word it better!),  “Tendulkar’s greatness lies not in his stats, but in his willingness to carry the nation on his shoulders and not shirk away from responsibilities.”

I think I am gradually becoming a naastik  

One of my cousins was a bit concerned on reading the above line as my Facebook status earlier this year (Naastik =”athiest” in Hindi), but those, who know about my love for Cricket, understood what I was referring to. I was referring to my decreasing faith in God of Cricket: Sachin Tendulkar. He has repeatedly faltered, especially in last few months, when Team India needed him to perform miracles. Yes, miracles! After all, that’s what Gods do, and that’s what he was used to be doing in pre-Ganguly era, when he almost single-handedly carried the burden of the whole team. That’s what he was doing when he took India to World Cup semi-final in 1996, Finals in 2003 and finally to being World Champion in 2011!

But lately, he hasn’t been at his Godly-best! He is still doing better than most of his teammates, but he could not prevent India’s 0-4 drubbing in England last summer, and then, again by the same margin in Australia a few days ago. I don’t care much about the 100th hundred, but as an ardent fan, I am concerned that it has been close to a year that he has scored a century, which is the longest he has waited for an international hundred (except for his second hundred way back in 1990.). He has again and again failed to capitalize on good starts (Twice falling in 90′s), and I must admit that I am deeply disappointed in him.

But it should stop at just that! If you want to stop deifying someone, go ahead and strip him off his God status, but at least, recognize his existence as a super-human (or at least a simple human). You don’t need to turn him into a selfish devil. But this is exactly what a number of Cricket experts and fans are doing. I read this article on Cricketnext, and it made me very angry. And the kind of support the article has got from some of the fans (both in the comments section and on Twitter) made me even angrier. They are calling Sachin selfish and claiming that he is overstaying his welcome in international arena. Many want him to retire from ODIs, and a good number want him to quit international Cricket altogether.

I am just a passionate follower of Cricket,  not an expert. But since I am a data-driven guy, I thought I could perhaps try to run some numbers to check whether I am just being emotional and supporting my favorite Cricketer blindly. The results didn’t surprise me at all, but I hope they provide some answers to Sachin haters.

All the statistics below are based on raw data sourced from Statsguru of ESPNCricinfo. Except for the first graph, which does not include the Ind-Aus ODI on  Feb 14, 2012, all graphs are current, as of today (Feb 15, 2012). First three graphs are based on data from last two years, while the last two (will be covered in the next part of this post) span Sachin’s entire career.

Since Sachin is overstaying his welcome in international Cricket, at least two or three (maybe more) Indian Cricketers must be consistently performing better than him. Right? Unfortunately, data does not support this.

Let us begin with data from ODI over last two years. Most people are questioning Sachin’s stay in this format. The same people are mostly okay with Gambhir, Sehwag, Kohli and especially Captain Cool Dhoni. (Don’t get me wrong! I am a fan of all these players too, but need to draw a quantitative comparison to answer Sachin-haters)

Well, if we go by the two main ODI parameters: batting average and Strike rate, Sachin is still decisively the best! Over the last two years, his batting average is the highest, and his strike rate of 95 is third highest among Indian batsmen. That means he is still scoring runs, and that too at a pretty brisk pace. Even if he is keeping his personal landmarks in mind, he is not slowing down the team’s score rate. Then, what makes him selfish, and how would you differentiate between scoring for oneself and scoring for the team? Yes, the team does have a lot of enthusiastic young Cricketers, and we have learned to win without him in the team, but to say that he doesn’t have a place in the team would be unfair.

Coming to test matches, even in his bad patch in Australia and England tours, he was our second best batsmen. I know that from a batting legend, we expect more than being best or second best in a group of non-performers. We want him to win or at least manage draws for us. But overall, Sachin-haters are much less vocal about his place in Test side. This is understandable, because here he stands much taller as compared to the rest in the team, especially when it comes to away-matches. (Graph excludes Kohli, M Vijay and others who played very few matches, but none of them were anywhere near the top ) But it was funny, when after the Australian debacle, one of my very good friends, unfortunately a Sachin hater, posted an FB update asking for forced retirements for Sachin & a couple others, and followed it up with “If required, drop Dhoni and Sehwag from the test squad for the next series” . Forced retirement for Sachin, and “if required” for Dhoni & Sehwag!!! Look at the attached graph and you’ll know why I found this outrageous. I know that Raina, Kohli and Sharma may be the future, but right now, we need Sachin to play at least another year of test Cricket.

Another way to look at the comparative performances is to compare share of the team pie, i.e. on an average, how much share of the team’s total is contributed by a particular batsmen. This allows us to take into account the value of a batsman’s contribution  in relatively low scoring matches. For example: Dravid’s 146 against England (Oval, 2011; Team score: 300) is far more important than his 119 against West Indies (Kolkata 2011; Team score: 631) To calculate this, I have calculated average of a batsman’s contributions, only for the matches that he has played in. The results may not offer a fair comparison, as I haven’t given any extra credit, if a batsman is not out. Also, this may be a bit unfair to batsmen like Raina and Dhoni, who bat at #6 or #7, and at these positions, usually it is not easy to contribute a lot, as either you under immense pressure because of top order failure, or you don’t have much to contribute, as top order has already amassed a huge total. Still, it can give us some idea about who is contributing the most to team’s score.

Here too, Sachin’s graph stands considerably taller than everybody else. On average, he scores 15.5% of the team’s total score, which is really high, when you are in the same team as Dravid, Laxman and Sehwag, all of whom, contribute between 13-14%  to the team score on average. (I didn’t run this analysis for the 90′s. I am sure this would be even higher for Sachin then!)

In the above three examples, I simply proved quantitatively the obvious:  “There is still no one in the Indian team, who comes close to Sachin”. But is Sachin really doing very bad, as per his own very high standards. Is this really the lowest point in his career? (Most of you know the answer to this question!). Isn’t two years a long period to compare someone’s current performance?  I will try to address these in the next part of this post.

Okay! Now, let me put on my Product Manager’s hat! As a Product manager, I would certainly pay heed to the above feature requests. But I also need to think of the features that end-user will not normally think of, and also the ones that will make Facebook some money. I have one such feature in mind:

Facebook surveys

Everyone needs to conduct some surveys at times: from schools conducting end of semester surveys on quality of teaching to companies seeking feedback for a new product they have launched. But traditionally, the response rate is quite low, especially for business surveys. We have an opportunity to add value here by providing a survey-forum. (I know Facebook allows for single question polls; I am talking about full length surveys, and some more.)

How it will work? Creating the surveys will be free for everyone: students, housewives, or general people using surveys for personal purposes or even, business purposes. However, I make a distinction on reaching out to respondents:

• Reaching  out directly: You want to send out a survey to your friends, or you have a business with a fan-page with 40,000 followers, and you ask them to fill out a FB survey. No problems! Go ahead and do it for free, and we’ll make money we usually do: by just keeping you and your followers/friends a bit longer somewhere on Facebook.
• FB mailing lists: So, you are planning to launch a new upscale restaurant for Chinese food in downtown San Francisco targeting mostly young people, but are a bit apprehensive about the idea. You want to conduct a field survey, but are concerned about the high costs and low response rate. No problems! Come to us, and we will give you the most comprehensive target list that is possible. We can include people precisely in the age group and geographical area you are targeting. From their recent check-ins, we can help you target people frequenting existing Chinese restaurants. And from their other “Likes”, interests and other information in their profile, we can even figure out their education and income levels if you need that. Of course, this will come at a price, but as you can see, this will be totally worth it!

To improve response rate, we can award varying level of virtual money to all respondents, and some real gifts for some randomly selected respondents. (We can work on how to make virtual money more valuable, but that’s a different feature idea for some other time!)

I found this writing exercise very interesting. Quite often, I keep on noticing things on different websites, which I would like to be a different. On Facebook, the list above is only a partial list of many such small things that I feel, can improve my FB experience. Will have to think a bit hard to recall all of them! Maybe another post, a bit more serious than this one, some time later!  But right now, I guess I will follow soon on what I feel can be added to LinkedIn. (And for that, I have much more serious, and important ideas. Surprised that they haven’t implemented those yet!)

What is facebook missing that you would like to see?

I would like to answer it from two perspectives: the end user’s perspective and a product manager’s perspective. Of course, the Product Manager needs to pay attention to what the end user wants too, but very often, for evolving services like Social Media, the end user doesn’t clearly know what he wants, and may end up stating some obvious answers, derived mostly from comparison from other similar services. It’s the product-management that comes up with ideas that gradually become a part of end-user’s experience. For example: How many of us thought that we need to “Like” a status update or a photo posted by one of our friends? Most of the time, a comment like “Kool dude!” or “Nice picture” did the job. And now that Facebook has introduced the concept of “Liking”, it has become an integral part of end-user’s Facebook experience. We are so used to “Liking” now that we have started missing a “Dislike” button!

Anyway, without further adieu, some features I would like to see from the end-user’s perspective. All responses are in voice of a generic end-user, not necessarily me!!

• Personalized recommendations: I have listed what my favorite books and movies are. You even know what I have been doing lately. I have just listed Spanish in my list of languages, and added a couple of Spanish movies in my favorite movies list. You know the tastes of my friends with whom I hang out the most.  Why can’t you help me figure out which movie or book I should try out next (a la Netflix)? Or maybe you can send a mail when a theater play that I would love is in town. You exactly know what I want, don’t you? So, why can’t you share your knowledge about me with me? I am even ready to tell you the names of the movies I detested, or the actors I can’t stand if that helps!
• An “Unsubscribe” button: I love to congratulate a friend when he changes his status from “In a relationship” to “Married”, or to tell another how cute she looks in the Chinese dress she just tried for a photo. But what I absolutely hate is that flurry of comments/mail notifications that will follow, because all friends of my friends would like to add a comment too!! In fact, I have stopped commenting on some of my friend’s updates because I know that they have a huge following, and one small comment is going to spam my mailbox for next seven days! I don’t want you to stop the mail-notifications completely, because many a times, I actually want to be a part of the conversation. But can you offer me a simple “unsubscribe” button that I can click as soon as I make a comment, or may be when I know that the conversation has nothing interesting for me?   (FB does provide an unsubscribe option for conversation on groups, but not at individual account level)
• Testimonials: I know my friends love me, but I want the whole world to know how awesome I am. Okay! Okay! Not the whole world, just that new, cute girl on the campus, whom I plan to send a Facebook friend request soon! I have tons of recommendations on LinkedIn that describe my professional excellence, but can I have some testimonials from my friends that tell everyone, how caring and/or cool I am! (Even that arcane Social media site Orkut allowed these!!)

For the Product Manager’s take, click here.

Anyway, without further adieu, here are the answers to the questions from the elims

1. Roger Federer
2. Norah Jones
3. George W Bush
4. Sony VAIO (Check out the logo, really cool!)
5. Amazon.com
6. Apple
7. Lady Gaga
8. Literature
9. Subway
10. IKEA
11. Southwest Airlines founder (Most MBA students will have at least one case on Southwest. So didn’t find it right to leave out Southwest completely from a quiz for MBA students!)
12. Jetlag
13. Fear of #13 (Did you notice the question number??)
14. Bankrupt/ Bankruptcy
15. BlackBerry

And here are the answers to questions from the non-business rounds:

Will follow up with a post on Business rounds and the final round!

As before, the comments are moderated, and I will approve them all, in a 2-3 days once I feel everybody has had a fair chance at attempting the questions. (Please post your answers here as comments, not on FB link for this post) Will be posting the questions from non-business rounds tomorrow.

Anyway, without further adieu, here are the questions from the elimination round. If you are a seasoned quizzer, you may find some of them extremely simple, but I believe there is some good stuff for everyone.

Leave your answers as comments to this post. I have enabled comment-moderation, so that everyone gets a fair chance. Will post the answers in a week and the questions from the main round in a couple of days.

Elimination Round

1. Nike created this logo for X. Identify X

2. The birth name of this multiple Grammy Award winning American music star is: Geethali _______  _______  Shankar, but she has now dropped “Geethali” and “Shankar” from her name, and goes by the name ____ ___ (the parts blanked out in the full name). Which singer are we talking about?

3. “Decision Points” is an autobiographical memoir released in 2010. Who is the author?

4. The logo of this company represents an integration of analog and digital technology, with part of logo representing an analog wave, while the other represents binary code. Which brand?

5. Which company is the parent company of The Internet Movie Database (IMDb)?

6. The image below shows the first logo of which present day company:

7. By what name do we know the singer Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta?

8. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1953. Which field?

9. What is the most famous offering of a company called Doctors’ Associates?

10. Swedish lawyer Ingvar Kamprad grew up in a village called Agunnaryd on a farm named Elmtaryd. At the age of 17, he founded a company named after his name, and the places he grew up in. Today, Kamprad is one of the world’s richest man, while the company he established is the world’s largest retailer in its segment.

Which company are we talking about?  

11. His name is Herb Kelleher. What is his claim to fame?

12. The medical term for this condition is desynchronosis. What term do we layman have for this?  

13. What is Triskaidekaphobia a fear of?

14. In North Italy, when a moneylender went out of business, the bench that he worked from, was physically broken. What modern day business term has its origin in this practice?

15. What is the Canadian company “Research In Motion” best known for?

• In my undergraduate institute, I had five Amits in my class. And this is just about my stream “Computer Science and Engineering”; I am not even trying to count the Amits from other streams, but the number should be at least 12!
• In the first year of engineering, we had to share hostel rooms: four guys in one room. In my room, there was one guy named Achal, and three of us were Amits! The hostel had a common phone for incoming calls from families of students (Most of us didn’t have cell-phones at that time), and one day in the very first week, when my roommate Amit Verma turned up twice for phone calls meant for Amit Bhatnagar and Amit Sachan, he instituted a rule: The callers should be asking for the person they want to talk to by their last name!
• At Adobe, I was one of five (or maybe six, I don’t remember correctly) Amits in my team. At company level? I don’t have the exact number, but the internal directory of the company had a maximum limit of 32 results for any search string.The last I searched for “Amit” as the first name, I maxed out the limit!

Anyways, when I got an admit to a B-school in USA, I was very sure that I should no longer be worried about this. In US, it should be the Johns and the Mikes, who should be facing this issue, not the Amits. Right? Unfortunately not! In Goizueta class of 2011, we have four people named Amit. Actually, it appears that Goizueta has a history of admitting many Amits. There were 3 Amits each in classes of 2009 and 2010 too!

I used to find solace in this fact that at least I don’t have a common last name; certainly, A “Bhatnagar” is relatively harder to find as compared to a Gupta, Kumar, Patel or Singh. But this changed when I joined Goizueta, and didn’t get a firstname_lastname email address for my official school ID, as I had a namesake from class of 2008. (Yes, another “Amit Bhatnagar”!) I was a bit disappointed, but still, I didn’t foresee the repercussions of this event.

Quiet often, my teammates sent across their drafts for team-assignments to the wrong Amit Bhatnagar; I missed birthday parties and Club leadership meetings; And at times, I was deemed unresponsive when mails supposedly addressed to me went unanswered.  And these are all the instances, where I actually got to know about this and explain the situation. I’ll perhaps never get to know how many people hate me for ignoring their mails.My namesake perhaps doesn’t check his mail quite often. And when he does, he has every reason to get irritated! The first time I got to meet him, he expressed his irritation: More than a year after he graduated, he had suddenly started mails requesting him to complete specific questions in team assignments! Anyway, by the end of the first year, everybody knew that just for official school mails, I am “Amit A Bhatnagar”. The problem was mostly over, and I had already seen the worst of it.

Or so I thought! Recently, I appeared for an interview with one of my target companies. After the first round, some of my friends got invitation for the second round, but I didn’t. Instead, I got a message from the company’s travel agents to book my flights (which I guess was for the second round) When I contacted them, I got to know that I had indeed made it to the second round, but perhaps, the HR lady, while sending out the invites, followed the regular firstname_lastname format for all the Emory guys, and hence missed my actual mail ID. Anyway, I booked my flight and got ready for the interview. At the pre-interview breakfast, we had an introduction session, where each of us had to share some elementary information and a “fun-fact” about oneself. I couldn’t think of a better fun fact than this, and everyone had a good laugh at my situation! But more was to come: the fun-fact for the girl sitting next to me! Believe it or not! Her husband’s name is “Amit Bhatnagar” (Yes, a third one!) and people in the common interview invite list were thinking that both of them were appearing for the same interview! Now, this was really unbelievable, and had it not been a formal interview session, I would have thought that she is making it up! (As an aside, her husband turned out to be a good friend of my brother-in-law and an “orkut friend” of mine, whom I had added six years back, just because I found someone sharing my name! Small world indeed!) By the way, do I even need to add where did the email for the offer letter go, once I cleared the decision round? I am sure you must have guessed that!

So, dear readers, when it’s time to find a name for your kids, think about my story twice and don’t go by popular superstars’ names (I am assuming the commonality of Amit in our generation is thanks to Mr. Bachchan’s popularity in the seventies and eighties). Try finding names in other languages maybe. (I suggested a Japanese name for my niece)

Do you have any such experiences with your name or other common names? Do share such stories in your comments. Maybe that will help me feel better

Well, if you thought that I am talking about finding a permanent place somewhere in US after landing a full time position here, then, I successfully misled you in the wrong direction. (If not, pardon the bad joke! ) I was actually talking about my new homepage: amitbhatnagar.com. The first time I started blogging in summer of 2005, like most bloggers at that time, I created an account on blogger, and got my first homepage: amitbhatnagar.blogspot.com (which still exists). Due to some technical glitches on blogspot, I lost control of my blogger account. And I am glad that I did! Because that’s when I moved to WordPress ( I wanted to have a personalized URL, and bhatnagaramit, abhatnagar, amitbhatnagar1 and other such variations were already taken.) and created my new blog at amitbhatnagar.wordpress.com. I really liked it, but it was only when I created a personal website for my MBA application blog, that I discovered the power of WordPress. By the time, I overhauled the student blog (again wordpress-based) of my school, I had started loving WordPress.

By this time, I knew that I wanted to host my blog at my own website, but amitbhatnagar.com was not available. So, finally, when this summer, I found that this domain is available, I immediately grabbed it! And a few months later, with multiple experiments with themes and WordPress plugins, I am finally ready to launch my own personalized website. Well, right now, it’s just a blog, but hopefully, some time soon, I will be adding more pages to it making it a complete website.

Considering how many times I have promised to be regular on the blog and failed, I won’t promise anything this time, but at least, I will try . Do share your valuable feedback in the comments section and keep coming back, as I continue my “Race Towards Infinity!”.

As I had mentioned in an earlier post too, I interned with Manheim auctions during the summer. Prior to that, I also worked on a GMSC project with them in Spring 2010 semester. Although almost whole of the time during these 7-8 months, my work was with the home-office, I got a chance to visit the live-auctions twice. It was a fascinating experience, and you have to be there to believe how exciting an auto-auction can be. Typically, a car gets sold in less than 30 seconds of hitting the auction floor!

Anyways, that’s not the main point of this post. Actually, I want to share something, which I observed multiple times on both occasions and found quite interesting. As I look back now, I know that I can explain in Jedi-terms what was happening there.
Okay.. So here is the sequence of what I often saw:

The seller starts the auction at a particular price. (Let us say $24,000)
Nobody bids.
The seller drops the price successively ($23,000, $22,000, $21,000) till he finds the first bidder, who bids let’s say $21,100
The bids starts coming in now: $21,200, $21,300, $21,400….
You will expect that the upper limit in this case would be $21,900. Right?? After all, the seller didn’t find a single buyer at $22,000. No! Surprisingly, more often than not the winning bid will cross the prices, which originally found no takers! And don’t be very surprised, if in a case like this, the winning bid crosses the seller’s originally asked price.
Two interesting observations here: Normally, in an auction, you will expect the seller to start at his reservation price, and expect the auction to take the action from there. Here, since the seller has the option of lowering the reservation price, you will often see the sellers start from well above their reservation price, as seen in example above. Second observation is even more interesting, the one pointed out in the last step of above sequence.

What exactly is happening here? My guess is that the buyers are simply avoiding the Winner’s curse, or at least minimizing their loss from the same. If they bid at $24,000, and win it because of no further bids, it’s the case of Winner’s Curse. They may feel that they have just bought a lemon, and they don’t even exactly know how much loss this is going to bring to them. However, in case the price is lowered, and the auction-action has brought the latest ask-price to $24,000, they know that at least one other buyer was willing to pay $23,900. So if the other buyer’s estimate was correct, their loss is no more than 100 bucks! So even if the Winner’s curse hits them, it may not be that hard for them!

Specifically at auctions at Manheim, a good number of their buyers bid online through a webcasting channel called Simulcast. These buyers do have factual details about the car, but since they are not present at the auction, they may rely on reactions and bids from the people at the live auction before launching their first bid.

I was trying to find a video on YouTube that illustrates the above phenomenon. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find one. But this one does come close, and will give you a fair idea: Manheim Auction. See the car that comes in at 1:15. Original ask price is $26,500, which quickly drops to $22,000, from where it starts getting bids. Finally, the car is sold for $22,900.